Animation/Mechanic issues

Issue:

My short hobbit bowmen have a bow attached to their hands via basic ability: orb...but when they attack, the arrow just flies out of their chest & the bow doesn't move from their side. (the model for the hobbit was based on the passive>campaign>human child which has no attack animations).

My questions:

The tutorial I used, was mapped to a human child - I put model to child over the archer & got same results...could I save the file when imported to the archer to retain her bow draw motion? How? (it seems the file always replaces the human child)

If I use one of the skins provided on here, then I need the attack type (bow or rifle or melee) needs to match the model's attack type?

Is there some option in the WC3 editor that I can toggle to make a melee hero use the bow draw animation?

I've been able thus far to trick ranged units in to looking like melee, but no luck going the other direction with Bows...from what I can tell I have to use the model with bow then skin it to look like a short guy instead of a female NE, in order to preserve the drawing action in the bow??

|||Attaching a model to another doesn't confer any animation on the attached model. If you want a bow attack animation, you need to have a base unit with a bow attack animation - models have no means to distinguish an attached weapon from you attaching a rabbit or a user interface model to it - they just go through their normal animations with whatever model you attach stapled to wherever you've attached it.

You can, however, change where an arrow (or any projectile) is fired from. All unit types have fields you can edit in the unit editor that determine the x, y, and z or projectile art launch points.|||I saw part of what you said.

Of note though ... none of the normal units with custom models will show an attack animation. The arrow just flies out of their chest & the arms remain completely stationary.

I assume this is because the libraries I have downloaded all these animations for models are not fully/correctly made. When I shoved a spell breaker on the archer it seemed to have worked - though I had to change the timing & the origin of the projectile like you mentioned to make it look smooth.

Thanks for the tips so far!

How much work would it take to make the arms move? I've been looking through the object properties & have to assume there's a storage place else where the firing motion is done? Can I just change a few variables to make a rifle man's arms move like he's firing a bow with an arrow?